When I was in my final years of college, we had a computer programming practical exam worth 60 marks out of 200. Most of my classmates chose common project topics and worked on them using VB, a programming language. However, my close friend decided to work on something different, which was .Net.

I had no knowledge of .Net and I always disliked computer science. My attendance in the computer lab was only 8%, and I’m not kidding about it.

By the time I realized I needed to choose a team, all the groups were already formed and I had no options left.

I managed to work on the backend SQL part, but I struggled to understand what my friend was doing. We had just one day left before the practical exam, and she called me at 6 pm to inform me that the page was not working.

We tried asking for help from our cousins, friends, lecturers, and everyone we knew, but nothing worked.

In the entire college, only two teams had chosen to work with .Net in the past three years, and the other team was considered our competition. We even approached them for help, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong either.

The next day, I told my friend something, and she panicked, asking if it would really work. I pretended to be cool and said, “Do we have a choice? Let’s take the risk.”

During the practical exam, while the teacher was asking us about the details of our project, we executed our plan. Vijetha ran through the program until the page where it was about to freeze. Then, I distracted the teacher by providing some additional information, and Mansa took the laptop, removed the problematic page, and reran the program. The second time, it worked smoothly.

Vijetha almost messed up by stuttering, but I managed to distract the teacher by talking about irrelevant topics. We successfully executed our plan, and he didn’t even notice that we had bluffed.

The teacher was impressed that we took the risk of working on a new platform, knowing that nobody in the entire college, including the lecturers, could help us. We earned extra credit for taking the risk.

We were the only team to score a perfect 60 out of 60, and we felt like rockstars as we walked out of the exam room.

That’s when I realized that I may not be good at creating products, but I have a talent for selling them.

That’s how my inner salesperson was born!